[kg02]

Hi,

My wife and I are 2.5 weeks away from bringing a 6.5 year old girl into our home. We have a transition plan in place with the girl's foster mom of 3 years, where the little girl has slowly built up to spend the last couple of weekend nights with us.

Each weekend she goes back to her foster mom for the week, and each time the foster mom seems to over react to the little girl's appearance or the things she says. This morning she called asking about a small scrape she had on her knee from crawling around on the rug with the dogs, since the little girl said my younger son had done it with nail clippers. She said she was going to call the on-call social worker to come out and have her look at it.

Children's services reacted very supportively last weekend when she made similar comments, but it feels like this woman is trying to undermine the little girl's placement in our home. The girl is confused about the whole process so she is definitely testing her loyalties to her foster mom when she is with us, and vice-versa when she is back in with the foster mom.

My question to the board is whether anyone else has had this type of experience, where a foster parent(s) has been so confrontational to the pre-adoptive placement. We know there is only 2.5 weeks before she is with us, and we know her social worker believes in us and the placement, but it feels like we are punched in the gut after each visit because of this woman. We know the foster mom cares about the little girl, but we just don't understand her motivation to continually harass us.

Thanks for letting me vent.

K

[lucyjoy]

I ran into this. My lawyer was able to speed up the placement into my home. It sounds as if the fmom wants to keep the child herself(and in my case, the fparents had said no but didn't expect the child to leave-odd)

Good luck and I hope this gets straightened out soon. It's very bad for the child involved.

[MilehighDad]

We had a really rough time with a group home where our daughter was staying. They wanted to control everything, including how long the transition should be and when we should get to visit. In the end, our worker couldn't get them to be reasonable so they refused to let her stay there any longer so our total transition time was less than a week. I'm pretty sure they didn't want to adopt her, so sometimes it is just about control.

I'm really sorry you ran into this, just keep your worker in the loop. It will shake out soon and just seem like a bad dream after she's moved in. Good luck!